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Happy New Year! Welcome to the Spring Semester! We hope everyone enjoyed their time off and is looking forward to spring. Our meeting schedule for this semester is as follows:

Wednesday, February 17, 2016, 12:20 PM – 1:15 PM

Monday, March 14, 2016, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Wednesday, April 20, 2016, 12:20 PM – 1:15 PM

Monday, May 9, 2016, 12:10 PM – 1:15 PM

All meetings will take place in E319 on the New York City campus and Miller 16 on the Pleasantville campus. As always, all are welcome to attend. If you would like to suggest future meeting topics, please comment below.

Our meeting on November 18th was very productive and full of exciting and new technology. As a break from our usual VC set-up between Miller 16 (PLV) and E319 (NYC), we had this meeting in Miller 21 (PLV) so the features of the brand new active learning classroom could be shown off. Beth Gordon of ITS led the discussion and over the 2016 January Intersession, NYC will be getting similar upgrades to these active learning classrooms. After this discussion, Rich Miller from Dyson IT gave a presentation on Adobe eSign (formerly Echo Sign) which has been piloted for the past year now and is really starting to take off, as it safely, securely, and seamlessly brings the tedious process of collecting signatures on a document into the 21st century.

The new active learning classrooms in Pleasantville give faculty the resources they need to engage their students in a more unconventional learning environment. This new classroom is not structured like a traditional classroom. For starters, just about everything in the room can move allowing for lessons to flow dynamically. All of the student chairs with attached desks swivel and move easily on the floor, so the room can be configured in the way best suited to each discussion. There is a lot of connected media in this classroom (including 3 large TV screens) allowing faculty to present digital content in addition to connecting with student devices. This new classroom is really state of the art and it is exciting as faculty begin to discover the new possibilities these rooms offer. For further information on the ALC classrooms, please contact your campus Ed Media department by clicking here.

Adobe eSign is a fantastic tool as it provides a fast cloud-based document signature solution to faculty and staff at Pace. Anyone with an e-mail account can receive and sign documents and they only need to type their name or sign with their finger (which works best on mobile devices as the program is mobile friendly). The process of sending out documents for signature is very easy too, akin to sending a simple e-mail. Any form can be used in eSign and Rich has put together a repository of all sorts of forms as a shortcut for users. This tool allows multiple signature to be collected in a timely fashion and give users controls so they can track all of their documents out for signature. An eSign account is only needed to initiate documents for signature, so if you are interested in this, please contact Rich Miller: rmiller@pace.edu.

If you have any comments or questions on this meeting or would like to suggest topics for future meetings, please comment below.

The Fall 2015 semester is now well underway and our first meeting occurred on Monday, September 21st. This meeting focused on a great new video tool that instructors and students alike will find beneficial called NBC Learn. John Blackwell from ITS showed us the technical ins and outs of this tool, while Associate Dean/English Chair/Professor, Bette Kirschstein, showed us how she is using it in her course(s). After discussion of this tool, the new Virtual Presence checklist was presented by Heather Askildsen from ITS. This is a great tool for all faculty as it will help them to increase the use of available technological resources in their courses.

NBC Learn Higher Ed is a fantastic resource provided by NBC to higher educational institutions. It contains a large library of archived NBC news coverage and stories spanning a magnitude of historical events. The tool includes options to search for videos and to create playlists. Anyone with Pace credentials can register and sign in to the site, by visiting this web page. NBC Learn has the potential to aid in student research in addition to enhance course content. The videos can be embedded into Blackboard as NBC Higher Learn now appears on Blackboard as a Course Tool.

To demonstrate the way that these videos can be used in the classroom, Bette Kirschstein showed us how she used NBC Learn in her courses. She emphasized the importance of giving historical context when teaching literature. To demonstrate the uniqueness of the tool, she highlighted two different videos from different times periods to show how collective views change over time. She pointed out that having the content right in Blackboard helped to enhance her course. We hope that many more faculty and students are able to get the most out of this tool.

Finally, Heather Askildsen showed us the new ITS website in addition to the Virtual Presence checklist that ITS and Academic Technologies worked hard to put together over the summer. The new ITS website makes it easy for faculty and students to find the resources they need and it can be accessed here. Areas of highlight include the digital toolkit which makes finding educational resources easy. This portion focused on the virtual presence checklist of the website; which can be found here. Going beyond just uploading a syllabus, the interactive version of this checklist gives faculty the resources and information they need to build robust Blackboard content and use other resources. The hope is that by encouraging faculty to use these tools that the teaching of Pace courses, both online and face to face, will be brought further into the 21st Century. This will help to create a much more pleasant experience for both students and faculty alike. The site also provides a paper version of the checklist.

We certainly kicked the semester off with a very full meeting. Please leave a comment if you have thoughts to share on the content of this meeting. If you have suggestions for future meetings, you can leave a comment too.

We hope everyone had a enjoyable summer and is looking forward to the exciting semester ahead. The mobile tech meetings for this semester are scheduled for the following dates and times:

Monday, September 21st 12:10pm – 1:10pm

Tuesday, October 13th 11:30am – 12:30 pm

Wednesday, November 18th 12:10pm – 1:10pm*

Tuesday, December 8th 12:10pm – 1:10pm

All meetings take place in E319 on the New York City campus and Miller 16 on the Pleasantville campus, *EXCEPT for the November meeting which will take place in Miller 21. Note that this location change only applies to Pleasantville. As always, all are welcome to attend. If you would like to suggest future meeting topics, please comment below.

At our last user group meeting for the Spring semester, we saw presentations on two incredible platforms that harness the power of video learning and seek to improve the way it is used in the classroom. Our first presentation was given by Renee Bruner from Zaption, a website that gives instructors tools to enhance online videos with interactive components. Following that, Heather Askildsen from ITS presented Lynda.com, a website with hundreds of quality video lessons on subjects ranging from Software Development to 3D Animation.

Zaption offers instructors tools to enhance video learning with educational videos that may be found on YouTube, vimeo, or other similar platforms. Instructors are able to create tours which can combine multiple videos and pictures together in a single lesson. Tours can have additional interactive elements added like multiple choice, free response questions, or a discussion board. Some of these interactive elements are self-grading and Zaption’s Analytic Center can feed grades into Blackboard and other Learning Management Systems. Instructors have control over the way the content is presented to students and they are able to trim clips, pause videos, and enhance content. For example, an instructor could pause a video that is displayed to include a definition.

It is free to sign up for a Zaption account, but it includes access only to basic features among other limitations. A paid premium account can unlock more advanced features. For more information on Zaption, you can check out their website, or consult this video for a more thorough overview. If you are interested in using Zaption, please let us know by leaving a comment on this post.

Moving on to Lynda.com, this is an incredible platform that everyone at Pace should check out when they have the opportunity. Lynda.com was created by a teacher by the name of Lynda who believes that it is essential to provide high quality video lessons to industry professionals and students in this rapidly changing digital age. All of the videos are organized into fully searchable courses, so users have the option of working their way through an entire course on a unfamiliar subject or just watching a single video on an aspect of a program with which they are unfamiliar. Lynda.com even offers video tutorials on advanced Instructor features in Blackboard. These videos and courses are available through both the website and the companion mobile app.

Unlike Zaption, Lynda.com only offers paid accounts, however it is available through ITS for free to anyone (faculty, staff, and students) with valid Pace credentials. You can access Lynda.com using your Pace username and password at this link. More information on Lynda.com mobile access and classroom uses can be found on this ITS page. You can also check out and browse the courses that they have available by checking out their website. If you use Lynda.com, we encourage you to share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

Microsoft has continued to make changes over the past few years in the way in which they deliver office to consumers. Since the introduction of Office 365 which offers the current versions to consumers in a subscription based model, there has been a push for Microsoft to make Office more mobile in the tablet age.

This past fall Microsoft rolled out the complete Office experience to iOS and these new apps match the modern look and feel of Office 2013. Furthermore, these apps now let you view and edit office documents for free. In order to use more advanced features for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, users can either make an in app purchase or redeem a license that comes in a multiple device subscription, now offered by Office 365.

For those unfamiliar, Office 365 is a yearly subscription to Office, but it includes cloud based storage and provides users with the most updated version. When used on multiple devices, this model can be a more economical option. Microsoft Office is further expanding the availability of Office beyond iPhone, iPad and PC platforms, as they will be rolling out new android versions in the coming months.

However, Microsoft’s Office Everywhere for Everyone campaign would not be complete if it did not bring the modern office experience to Mac. It has been more than four years since Office for Mac 2011 launched in 2010 making Office for Mac 2015 long overdue. The new screenshots released by Microsoft confirm that Office for Mac will match the Windows experience and aesthetics. This will no longer be a less powerful version.Additional improvements include support for SkyDrive and Retina Displays, in addition to One Note for Mac, which is available for free right now on the Mac App Store. Office for Mac 2015 is expected to launch in the later half of 2015, with a beta coming sometime in the spring.

To summarize, Microsoft is making big changes in the ways that Office is brought to consumers. They brought new apps for iPhone users in addition to updating their iPad apps. They are previewing and testing new android apps and are working to update the Office for Mac experience. However, the biggest change is there is now limited free access to such a critical tool for everyone, even if they don’t have a subscription. If you have thoughts on the new Office experience or Office 365, you can share them by commenting below. It will be interesting to see how these apps shape up in the coming year.

Welcome back as the January Intersession is now well underway. Our blog celebrates a milestone as this is our 100th published post. Once the Spring semester begins, our mobile tech meetings will resume, following the dates and times listed below.

Tuesday, February 3rd 12:30pm-1:30pm

Thursday, March 5th 3:30pm-4:30pm

Tuesday, April 7th 3:30pm-4:30pm

Thursday, May 7th 3:30pm-4:30pm

These meetings will take place in Miller 16 in Pleasantville and and E319 in New York. Everyone is welcome to attend, so we look forward to seeing you there. If you have suggestions for future meeting topics, feel free to leave a comment below.

On December 9th we had our third and final user group meeting of the semester. Heather Askildsen and Megan Burke from ITS presented Poll Everywhere, an exciting online interactive audience response system, while Jermain Smith from the School of Education showed us the “gamification” of learning by providing examples of two companies on the cutting edge of this new approach.

Heather and Megan demonstrated some premium features of Poll Everywhere and discussed how it could be implemented in an educational setting. For those unfamiliar with the tool, Poll Everywhere is a web-based application that allows presenters to create polls and have their audience respond with a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. The company offers a limited free version of this software, with the ability to purchase a subscription for some premium features. Heather and Megan played a short video, which provides a good overview of the tool. They provided several suggestions for the various ways in which instructors might be able to utilize this tool in the classroom. Finally, their presentation concluded with a chance for attendees to participate in a live test.

Some of the ways Heather and Megan felt that Poll Everywhere would be helpful in the classroom include:

Taking Attendance – Professors have the option of creating a free response poll in which all posts are time stamped, so instructors know who got to class and when.

Checking for Student Understanding – Professors can make multiple choice polls and gauge how many students feel they understand the concept. If some students are struggling to understand, then professors can use that feedback to focus the lecture better.

Encouraging Students – Professors have controls with the software of what they want to display to the class. If they think a student posts something exceptional, they can call it out. If a student sends something that is inappropriate, they have the option to block that content.

For more information on Poll Everywhere and to play around with the free version, you can head on over to their official site and try it out for yourself. If anyone uses this tool, it would be nice to hear your thoughts and comments on this service. If you have found innovative ways to use it in the classroom, feel free to share those too.

Jermain, Director of Technology for the School of Education, presented two companies that are combining modern technology and games to improve educational experiences for students. The first company he introduced us to was Wavicle through an introductory video. This company offers game based learning solutions and can help educators build game based courses that engage students in new ways. The second company he presented was TeachLivE, which was developed in conjunction with the University of Central Florida. This technology has already been implemented within the Avatar Labs for the School of Education at Pace. This resource can be used to help train student teachers in speaking with students and classroom management skills. Essentially, prospective instructors speak to an animated classroom and the students react and perform in real time. Jermain played a video of a student teacher interacting with these avatars to help illustrate how his department was using this software.

A big thank you to Heather, Megan, and Jermain for taking the time to educate us in these exciting new technologies.

Wishing everyone a peaceful and relaxing break. We will be having our first meeting of the Spring Semester, sometime in February. Please stay tuned to the blog for the date and times for our spring meetings. As always, feel free to comment below, we would love to hear your thoughts.

My friend calls me the technology wiz who really dislikes technology. I accepted the iPad loaner challenge, recognizing that it behooves me to join the 21st century and explore the world of tablets. I attended the monthly user group meetings and learned about the Glogster app from Education department professor Peter McDermott. My understanding was that students could use this website to create multimedia posters online. Little did I know introduction to this app would mushroom into a major class assignment!

Each semester for the last few years I have arranged a Sustainability Tour on both NYC and Pleasantville campuses for my videoconference course ENV 235, Sustainable Living in Our World. This year I would be unable to attend, as I was organizing an environmental conference in Washington, DC. I wanted to be certain that students participated in the tours despite my absence and I also wanted students to share experiences with their classmates on the “other” campus. My “aha” moment came when I realized students could create posters with Glogster and, to increase the excitement level, I could turn the assignment into a contest. One of the students needed extra credit and thus volunteered to create a Survey Monkey questionnaire allowing her classmates to rank the posters and provide evaluative comments anonymously.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about technology, it is to expect the unexpected. The complexity of this assignment grew at every step. I hadn’t realized that Glogster required the professor to open an account, but when students couldn’t access the software I went ahead and purchased a relatively inexpensive 1-year account that provided space for 30 student posters. Only to learn after-the-fact that a more limited free version was also available. In order to post the completed glogs on Survey Monkey they would have to be in PDF format, but Glogster is designed for online use only. With guidance from the company helpline, I downloaded freeware from Bullzip to convert the glogsters into PDFs. Since the Sustainability Tour posters were beautiful and students spent far more time on the assignment than I had anticipated, I decided to have them printed. The posters were hung and admired at the new Environmental Center in Pleasantville during a recent party introducing the new Environmental Studies and Sciences Department.

All of my original goals were met, and then some. Students loved using Glogster. The full version has many exciting tools, including built-in survey software. Students did not include videos in their multimedia posters because this was not compatible with Survey Monkey, but in the future that would certainly be an option. There was 100% attendance for the tours despite my absence, and I could determine by reviewing the posters that they listened and learned. And students had an opportunity to share their experiences with classmates on the “other” campus. New technology has many challenges and can often be time-consuming . . . . but it offers incredibly rich surprises to strengthen the learning experience in wonderful ways!